Arthritis Pain and Exercise 2

Things To Remember While Exercising

Even if you don’t perform any actual exercises, you should always keep your joints moving on daily basis because that will help to prevent stiffness and a reduction in your range of motion. This will make it much easier to exercise once you actually begin your workout.

You should always try to exercise regularly, meaning at least every other day, because doing them on a regular basis will help your body adjust and develop a routine. This means that you should exercise on the good and bad days; sometimes the arthritis pain will be worse on some days than others, but you should still exercise on those days. If the pain from your arthritis is very severe, you can try modifying your workouts to make it a little more bearable.

If you have an inflamed or swollen joint you should only move it very gently, and don’t try moving it past your comfortable range of motion, because moving it further can and most likely will cause more damage, pain, and inflammation.

Never overdo it or start off doing too much because that will only end badly. If your body is telling you to stop then you should definitely listen. If a particular exercise causes severe pain or even worsens your current arthritis pain, then you should stop doing it for the time being, or stop doing it all together.

This isn’t a path for you to become the next Lance Armstrong or Terminator, so if you get tired, you should rest and take a few minutes to recover; you won’t do yourself any good by tiring yourself out and causing your body to burnout.

Begin every exercise session with a consistent set up warm up exercises. Warming up is very important to limber up and stretch out your muscles. Not warming up can be very bad and cause much damage while you exercise because working out with cold muscles is a recipe for disaster. You don’t want to pull a muscle or over-extend a joint, so always warm up first.

Both when stretching and when exercising you should always try to achieve your full range of motion. This can be done by stretching and doing exercises until you feel a light stretching sensation. Always remember to only go so far, and if you feel your muscles stretching too far or even feel pain, you should not go any further. Listen to your body!

Never let anyone else dictate how much exercise you do and what pace to move at. You are the only one who can judge how comfortable you feel and how much pain you are in. If your arthritis pain is severe, always be sure to perform all exercises very slowly and steadily.

One of the most important things to do when doing strength training is to maintain proper form. Lifting weights or doing body weight training with improper form can cause serious injury to your muscles and your joints, something that is to be avoided when dealing with arthritis. Use the exercise machines and small free weights to do strength training. Other options include resistance bands, resistance training in water, as well as isometrics too. If you have severe arthritis it is wise to not lift too much at once, but instead do more repetitions of each exercise using a lower weight.